Electroweak Symmetry Breaking from the Soft Portal into Dark Matter and Prediction for Direct Detection

Scalar dark matter (DM) can have dimensionful coupling to the Higgs boson-the soft portal into DM-which is predicted to be unsuppressed by the underlying SO(10) grand unified theory ( GUT). The dimensionful coupling can be large, mu/v >> 1, without spoiling the perturbativity of low energy theory up to the GUT scale. We show that the soft portal into DM naturally triggers radiative electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB) via large 1-loop DM corrections to the effective potential. In this scenario, EWSB, the DM thermal freeze-out cross section, and DM scattering on nuclei are all dominated by the same coupling, predicting the DM mass range to be 700 GeV < M-DM < 2 TeV. The spin-independent direct detection cross section is predicted to be just below the present experimental bounds.